Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing documents the thriving folklore tradition that circulates in the workplace. Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter have collected more than two hundred and fifty "signs of the times"--the office memoranda, parodies, cartoons, and poems that daily make their way through copy machines, interoffice mail systems, and fax machines and are affixed to bulletin boards and water coolers. The rich vein of urban folklore tapped by this imaginative volume constitutes a great testament to one of the world's most prolific authors--anonymous. The popularity of the items featured in this timely book is apparent by their reproduction in mass or popular cultural form--as greeting cards, plaques, and bumper stickers--reminding us of the inevitable interplay between folklore and mass culture. Dundes and Pagter clearly demonstrate the existence of folklore in the modern urban technological world and refute the notion that folklore reflects only the past.

Office copier folklore?those tattered sheets of cartoons, mottoes, zany poems, defiant sayings, parodies, and crude jokes that regularly circulate in office buildings everywhere?is the subject of this innovative study. this type of folklore represents a major form of tradition in modern America, and the authors have compiled this raw data for scholarship?and entertainment. These creations of the Paperwork Empire comment on topics and problems that concern all urban Americans. No one and nothing escapes their raunchy wit and sarcasm. Bosses, ethnic groups, minorities, the sexes, alternative lifestyles, politics, welfare, government workers, the law, bureaucracy, and even "The Night Before Christmas" all come under fire to form a biting, and hilarious, commentary on modern American society.

This text presents a collection of nearly 200 examples of the fake memos, pseudo mottoes and folk cartoons that are transmitted by fax, email and the Internet. It treats these examples of photocopylore as cultural artefacts recording folklore and culture in the post-print era.

Book by Dundes, Alan, Pagter, Carl

Work Hard and You Shall be Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (paperback)

"... Dundes has produced a work which will be useful to both students and teachers who wish to broaden their understanding of modern folklore." — Center for Southern Folklore Magazine "It is impossible ever to remain unimpressed with [Dundes'] excursuses, however much one may be in disagreement (or not) with his conclusions." — Forum for Modern Language Studies Often controversial, Alan Dundes's scholarship is always provocative, perceptive, and intelligent. His concern here is to assess the material folklorists have so painstakingly amassed and classified, to interpret folklore, and to use folklore to increase our understanding of human nature and culture.

new edition with a further illustrative plates by Gini Lusini